


macabre pleasure

by timelessidyll



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Blood, Gore, M/M, Violence, again relationship is minor, hnnn tags are hard, taeil is like a psychopath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-18
Packaged: 2019-05-25 02:01:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14966711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timelessidyll/pseuds/timelessidyll
Summary: Taeil didn't necessarily think he had bad habits. He simply did things that others couldn't because of a misplaced sense of justice. Nothing wrong with a killing here and there.





	macabre pleasure

**Author's Note:**

> idek why i put a relationship in when it's just me projecting about how it would feel to be a psychotic killer.

At first glance, Moon Taeil is nothing to think twice about. His face isn’t necessarily forgettable, but he blends in well with the crowd. He’s not too short, not too tall. Average black hair, although you can only tell when the dye starts to fade and his roots grew in. He can’t tell you the last time he’s had his natural hair. When he talks, his voice is lulling, smooth, but not in a way that captures your attention. There’s absolutely nothing remarkable about him.

Look again. See the smirk on his face when you start to lose focus. See him slip a tablet in your drink. See him continue giving you a false sense of security as you slowly lower your guard. Your first and last mistake: you underestimated him. You take a sip of your champagne. Before you know it, the world is dipping in and out of focus. You black out for a few seconds and come back to see him smiling at you, calm and serene because he knows exactly what he’s done. It’s your last conscious thought to recognize where you went wrong.

Don’t get it twisted. Out of everyone at Nexus, Moon Taeil is the most dangerous.

 

* * *

 

Taeil glanced at his watch – a pretty crystal thing, a gift from Youngho a few years ago – and glanced at the body across from him. A light sigh escaped him. Yoonoh had told him he couldn’t leave the room until one of them came to collect them. Them could be anyone, but the problem was that it had been twenty minutes since he’d completed his part of the plan and there was no one. They were usually never this incompetent. He tucked a lock of curly, golden brown hair behind his ear, making a mental reminder to cut it soon. Yoonoh would most likely mourn its loss, but he didn’t need it falling in his eyes. He pulled out a small knife from the pocket strapped inside his arm and began to pick at his nails with it. Three minutes had passed since he last checked the time.

He glanced at the body again. An itch made itself known in Taeil’s hands, but he restrained himself. As much as he wanted to use his knife to carve into the corpse collapsed on the ground, he had to resist. Youngho and Yoonoh hadn’t been too happy with him the last time he did that. He didn’t want to carve into the Padauk table either. He didn’t particularly care for the type of tree, but the long dining table was the highlight of the study room, and as such his target had discussed its texture and depth extensively. Its gleaming red shine and lines of black winding through the grain was too beautiful for him to deface so crudely. A minute had passed.

The doors in front of him opened to reveal Taeil sitting at the head of the table, twirling his knife between his fingers out of pure boredom. Youngho gazed at him impassively, only the smallest of movements telling him to come with. There was a small spot of blood on his sleeve, and Taeil rolled his eyes. He’d been sloppy.

“You shouldn’t have rushed the job for me,” he drawled, standing leisurely and making his way to Youngho, stepping primly over the arm in his path.

“He flailed a little too much,” Youngho offered in explanation, ignoring how Taeil tsked at him. “We’re clear to leave.”

“The others didn’t disappoint,” Taeil hummed, a subtle jab at Youngho’s unprofessionalism hidden in his words. Youngho didn’t retaliate, merely rolling his eyes and leading Taeil to where the others were gathered. Taeyong took a look at Youngho’s pinched eyebrows and Taeil’s smug grin and turned away with a sigh. Sicheng gave Taeil an unimpressed stare, to which he got a shrug in response.

The left Lee Hyunsung’s house the same way they entered. The butlers, blissfully – ignorantly – unaware that their employer was getting colder by the minute, led them back to their vehicles. They exchanged the necessary pleasantries and were easily on their way. It would be another hour before a maid would discover Hyunsung’s body in the study, no sign of foul play to be seen. The cause of death: cardiac arrest – officially.

“Who did you kill?” It was a question for Youngho. As much as Taeil enjoyed poking at him, there’s was a curiosity in his tone that only made itself known when there was a murder to talk about.

“A security guard who was getting too close.” An acceptable response. Taeil would’ve asked for more details if his phone hadn’t started ringing. There wasn’t a caller id – safety precautions, they couldn’t risk the phone being hacked – but Taeil had memorized everyone’s numbers. All 30 of them.

“Soonyoung,” he greeted, tilting his head to the side out of habit.

“Hey, Taeil!” The other operative’s voice was bright and energetic, a sharp contrast to Taeil’s much more subdued demeanor. “Yoonoh wanted me to tell you he had a mission come up, otherwise he would have called you himself. Someone wants a politician dead, you know how it is.” Taeil did not, in fact, know how it was, but he kept his tone politely amused. He was willing to deal with Soonyoung’s energy only because his earlier kill had settled him a little.

“Is that all?” Soonyoung gave an affirmative sound as a response. “Then thank you for passing on Yoonoh’s message. Bye Soonyoung.” The call disconnected and Taeil turned his attention back to the matters in the car. “Taeyong, how’s our schedule looking?”

“We’ve got nothing until Thursday. Some drug leader wants another one dead. Not really important, and you can take a sniper shot for that one.”

Taeil pouted. “But that means I can’t have any fun.”

“Your definition of fun is a little messy, Taeil,” Taeyong deadpanned, and Taeil shrugged.

“If I get the job done, I should be able to a play a little, shouldn’t I?”

“You just make a big mess,” Sicheng added, “You literally tear them up and make us worry about evidence. Dongyoung has a fit every time he sees what you do.”

“Can I at least mess with them like today?” he tried to compromise, but Youngho jumped in as well.

“You’ll either snipe him or sit out, got it?” His mouth was set in a hard line, but Taeil knew his snappiness wasn’t from earlier. Youngho didn’t hold grudges, but he had more morals than Taeil ever had, and he always had to keep him in check. Who knew what Taeil would’ve done on his own.

There was plenty to do while he waited. Taeil was charged with checking revenue reports, something he did while carving to keep himself focused. He was working on a simple cat, easy enough for someone with only a little experience. It would’ve been better if the bone marrow in the center hadn’t gotten in the way, but Taeil had adapted the best he could. What had started as a radius was now a cat, and Taeil marveled at how easily one could mistake it as an animal bone. Three minutes past eleven, over seven hours since Taeil, Youngho, Taeyong, and Sicheng had returned, Yoonoh and Seungcheol were back.

“You got stuck with revenue reports again?” his voice said from behind him, and Taeil laughed.

“Not everyone hates reports like you do, Yoonie.” There was a clear grimace on Yoonoh’s face when Taeil looked at him, and it only made Taeil’s smirk widen. Here, now, he wasn’t the conniving, sadistic contract killer, but a personality more suitable to being around Yoonoh. Certainly, there wouldn’t have been an issue if he had kept the same personality in a uniform fashion, but living the life he had before Nexus had taught him more than enough. Tailor yourself to each individual person, like a chameleon. That was the only way you would survive, climb your way into a position of more importance. Taeil hadn’t racked up two hundred kills by being a bubbly person.

“Will you be finished soon?” It’s an innocent question; maybe Yoonoh would ask him if they wanted to eat at the Chinese place down the street, maybe they would watch a movie, maybe they would get a cup of coffee to get them through the night. Taeil knew better.

“I’ll meet you there.” It wasn’t an answer, but they didn’t need it to be.

The shooting range isn’t loud – silencers are quite the invention. Taeil treats the range like a second home. He’s probably spent more time in here than in his own room, practicing with different guns, training his precision and aim beyond anyone’s imagination. It was almost a stress relief, imagining the bullseyes and straw dummies to be his targets. A heart. A brain. A lung. So many options, whether they should die quickly or bleed out. Truly, it depended on his mood. He passed by the shooting range.

“You’re lucky I don’t have a job tomorrow,” he announced airily. Yoonoh cracked a small smile, already in tighter clothing on the other side of the sparring room.

“You say that as if you can’t beat my ass on your good days.” This brought a chuckle from Taeil.

“I’ll change. How long do you want to go?”

“Three matches, each best out of three. Think you can handle it?”

“You’ve never given me anything I couldn’t handle. I’m not going to stop now.”

Sparring was another stress relief as much as it was to improve. Another detail many overlooked – Taeil was much stronger than his small physique let on. He could easily throw most of the other members of Nexus in a sparring match, although the taller ones were always more difficult because of how gangly they were. Taeil hated being matched up with Mingyu or Youngho. He enjoyed the freedom that sparring gave him, the different ways he could pin someone down and immobilize them. Maybe he had a superiority complex. So what.

“This’ll be rough.”

“That’s what you said last night.”

“Taeil, for the love of god, shut your bitch ass mouth.”

 

* * *

 

He was back on another job, this time at a bar, wearing a mesh shirt that didn’t leave much to the imagination and a pair of jeans so ripped that they could hardly be called jeans anymore. His personality: a sultry clubber who was looking for someone to have a good fuck with. Who just so happened to be his target, and who just so happened to have caught his eye and was already on his way over. It was yet another drug lord. A desperate one at that – all it had taken was a tilt of Taeil’s head and he’d been hooked. There was no fun in that.

“What’s a pretty young thing like you doing here?” The conversation starter almost made Taeil gag, and it took him remembering how nice it would feel to get rid of this man to not lose character. He tried to ignore the greasy smile directed his way.

“Perhaps I’m looking for someone. Think I’ve got a chance?”

“Wanna find out?” Oh, this was too simple. Taeil was getting frustrated. There wasn’t any challenge to luring this target in, no obstacles to be faced. If the drug lord had the possibility of a clean death before, it definitely wasn’t an option now. He let himself be brought into a hotel room, one that was relatively nice, he supposed. He’d killed in fancier places, killed fancier people. But that didn’t really matter once the door closed. Taeil let the drug lord pin him against the wall – he couldn’t remember his name for the life of him, although that was probably just as well since it would blow his cover – and let him have a single bruising kiss. He was hyper-aware of his lips, utterly disgusted on the inside, but he needed to wait a little longer. Just until he let his guard down a little more. Until he forgot about the knife in his pocket and the gun in his holster so Taeil could grab them. The downside to his outfit was he couldn’t bring any weapons with, but that was alright. He’d always been good at improvising. As the drug lord’s mouth traveled downwards, stopping on his neck, Taeil breathed out once, slowly, to calm his heartbeat, and used his leg to sweep the drug lord off his feet. He landed on the ground with a thud, disoriented for a few crucial seconds, and that was all Taeil ever needed. The knife and gun ended up in his hands, and Taeil shoved a silencer on the gun before letting off four shots, one into each shoulder and his own legs. The pain caught up to him a moment later when the shock faded, but Taeil was quick to shove the man’s shirt into his mouth. Satisfied that the drug lord wouldn’t be making an escape anytime soon, Taeil sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at his target condescendingly.

“I’ll only say it once because Youngho said I need to learn some morals, but you have two options. You can struggle while I carve up your body or you can sit there and die quietly. Either way, I’m going to be having some fun, hm?”

Before Nexus, before becoming one of their most prized contract killers, Taeil hadn’t been anything at all. It was only when he got away with hiding a murder committed three years before did Nexus even take interest in him. His victim: a former drug dealer, dead set on collecting debts that had gone unpaid. And since Taeil’s mother had died, the dealer came for him. As an aspiring forensicist, he had a clear idea of what the department would look for. His plan only had one slip-up, and that was that he’d left the body behind. In the time in between, he’d killed four more people, although those murders never came to light. Nothing slipped past Nexus, however, and two weeks after he’d been taken in, they’d brought him up for trial. He walked out as a trainee for Nexus, his record wiped clean, and a little more vengeful.

He found it strange how he always reminisced about his past whenever he got to the eyes. He always spent more time on them, carefully separating the eye from the optic nerve connecting it to the brain and rolling it between his eyes. At some point, the man had stopped moving entirely, probably due to the fact that Taeil had carved a crescent moon into his chest cavity around his heart. That would do the trick. He took care to leave as little blood around them as he could, waiting a few minutes after he’d finished the moon to let the body fully die. The blood would start pooling at the bottom of the body now that the heart had stopped pumping, but the best time to begin the rest of his carving would be just before the muscles froze up. Taeil stood up and took a step back to admire his handiwork before smiling and taking both the knife and gun, shoving them into his waistband, checking himself in the mirror to see if they could be seen peeking out from his shirt or jeans. He exited the hotel room alone, humming to himself a tune he’d heard the other day. Yoonoh liked the artist, so Taeil gave him a shot. He couldn’t say he liked his past music, but his most recent album was nice. Catchy. The receptionist didn’t give him a second glance. Nexus would send someone to clean up after him at some point before the morning, so Taeil didn’t worry about the scene he’d left behind. His phone rang.

“So I hear you’re done?” Yoonoh’s voice came through the moment the call connects.

“I just walked out of the hotel,” Taeil said, an eyebrow lifted and lips curled in amusement.

“You wanna go to Ten’s?”

“If he’s offering, I won’t say no.”

“Meet me there.”

Taeil showed up at Ten’s restaurant in the same mesh shirt and ripped jeans he’d left for the club in, although he’d made a small effort to clean himself up when he’d dropped off the weapons at their headquarters. The blood had been cleaned off and he looked a little more presentable, but he didn’t miss the way Yoonoh rolled his eyes and Ten glared at him. Ten came over to them personally.

“When I offered you to come in, I didn’t mean looking like a slut,” he hissed, although he already had a notepad out.

“Sorry, Ten,” Taeil apologized with the least convincing smile on his face. Yoonoh stifled his laughter behind his hand.

“Whatever. Just tell me what you want.” They gave him their regular order. During their wait, they talked aimlessly about the other members, taking care not to say anything incriminating. Taeil caught the disgruntled stares of other patrons every now and then, but he paid them no heed.

“My next assignment is overseas,” Yoonoh said suddenly when they were discussing how Mark was doing in tech. Taeil blinked once, twice, let his eyes drift down to the table. He ran through the consequences in his head.

“How long?”

“They’re saying a week. I have to gather some information before I can finish.” Taeil nodded after Yoonoh responded, his face slack and emotionless. Yoonoh grimaced; he knew Taeil wouldn’t take it well, but he had to say it. “I’m sorry.”

“When are you leaving?”

“In two weeks.”

“Well, you’re already doing remarkably better than last year,” Taeil replied drily. He took a sip from his cup. “I’ll be waiting, then. Where are you going?” Yoonoh relaxed. He’d been prepared for Taeil’s emotions to swing from extremes, but he’d stayed relatively calm. He hoped it wouldn’t blow up later. Ten came back with their food after a few more minutes, and they ate in relative silence, every now and then lifting their forks to give each other a taste of their dish. Taeil’s apartment was closest to Ten’s restaurant, so it was Yoonoh who would be dropping Taeil off. When they stopped in front of his door, Taeil smiled at Yoonoh and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before disappearing inside.

The moment Yoonoh was down the street, Taeil left again, seven knives strapped along his limbs for easy access. He was itchy again, and he needed to relieve that. Time to find a victim for himself, then.


End file.
